Photographer highlights beauty ignored in struggling communities

Brittani Sensabaugh has spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of people in forgotten communities.

Brittani Sensabaugh has spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of people in forgotten communities.

Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

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Brittani Sensabaugh has spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of people in forgotten communities.

Brittani Sensabaugh has spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of people in forgotten communities.

Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Photographer highlights beauty ignored in struggling communities

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It started quietly at first, on a New York City subway train. Brittani Sensabaugh was keeping to herself, wearing a hoodie that read “Oakland,” when an older white woman looked right at her.

“Don’t go there,” she said as she pointed at her sweatshirt. That place was full of drugs and violence. “She was just saying really negative things about a place that I grew up in,” Sensabaugh says. “I was getting off the train, and I stopped her and said, ‘You know, I’m none of those things, and I’m from there.’”

Sensabaugh left the train angry. Disappointed, too, she says, now that she thinks about it a few years later. She wondered how a woman who had probably never been to Oakland could so easily dismiss it — so easily dismiss all the people who called it home. “It made me want to come back home and show the Oakland that I was raised in, and just the love and culture that I came up in, and also bring awareness to why the destruction is happening in these areas.”

So she did. She came home to East Oakland, the place where she’d grown up, and walked the same drags she used to walk years before, only this time she carried a camera, and she created a visual archive of the place she had known. “It taught me struggle, but it taught me even more love,” she says. “What I saw in East Oakland is what I see even now when I document it. Our people are beautiful.”

Homecoming show

A selection of the photographs that grew out of this work — along with others taken in other communities — form something of a homecoming show for Sensabaugh at the Betti Ono Gallery in Oakland that she’s called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” (The exhibition was scheduled to run through April, but will be closing Friday, Feb. 26.)

Sensabaugh, who still lives in New York City, has assembled a multifaceted portrait of black communities — or, as she prefers to call them, “melanated” communities — that are frequently ignored. Outsiders see these places as hopeless, she says, but that’s because they don’t know them.

“Who is documenting us? Who is documenting the moments that are pure?” she asks, waving toward a gallery wall that shows a daughter riding high on her father’s shoulders and a mother leaning down to kiss her little girl. “These moments right here — love being shown — who is documenting that?”

Sensabaugh has wide, expressive eyes. Maybe that’s the reason, being around her, you sometimes get the feeling she might see deeper than most. She wraps herself, more often than not, in strong colors and patterns and begins emails with the greeting “Peace love!” She calls people kings and empresses, little children are “seeds,” and she makes a special effort to compliment their natural hair. “Ahh. Your hair is so beautiful,” she’ll say. “I love your hair.” (A considerable part of the show is dedicated to children staring straight into the camera and to the natural hairstyles she finds as she walks the streets.)

Wanting to write

Back in high school, when she was just 17 and growing up in East Oakland, Sensabaugh was setting her mind toward writing — something she got from her mom. “My mother’s a beautiful writer,” she says. “She would always write me these uplifting notes.” Her brother thought some visuals to go with all the words might be nice, and Sensabaugh didn’t disagree. But it would be years before she’d figure out what to do with the Kodak camera he gave her then. It would take six years to be exact, six years that would unfold in a staccato, two-year rhythm.

Two years after he gave her the camera, Sensabaugh’s brother died, unexpectedly, in his sleep at the age of 28. His death stirred something in her and she picked up the camera and began cataloging street fashion.

Fashion photos

Two years after her brother’s death, Sensabaugh followed fashion photography to New York, only to realize the subject was wearing thin. There, people traded in designer names. “I was doing it because I like expression,” she says. The label didn’t matter; the story did. Then, two years after the move to New York, the woman on the subway had something to say.

During the years that followed, Sensabaugh’s project grew well beyond East Oakland. She went back to New York and shot in Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem. Then she started making her way to places in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. Detroit and New Orleans are up next. “There were times I couldn’t afford my damn rent in New York, but I made sure I documented a city. I made sure I did it.”

When she plans a trip, she purposefully seeks out neighborhoods and projects that are talked about only because of their crime rates. She builds up trust first, starting with conversations, being as open as possible, always with the goal of bringing out the “light that is there.”

Acknowledging realities

Still, there’s evident struggle in her work, too. She highlights and uplifts while acknowledging certain realities. In one photograph, a man smokes crack cocaine. Several images draw attention to how difficult it is to find nutritious food in these areas — a liquor sign floats in one background and a street vendor pumps his fists, full of soda, into the air. One image shows only a woman’s hands, fresh with red acrylic nails, holding a pack of Newport cigarettes. (Later, after she’s left the gallery, Sensabaugh posts two documents on her Instagram account, outlining the way tobacco companies target vulnerable communities.)

“We are beauty, we are love, but we are at war. We are in the trenches, we are fighting every day,” Sensabaugh says. But if you leave it to outsiders, these stories don’t get told, that beauty never comes out, and the scene on the subway repeats itself.